Published October 7, 2024
Another benefit to driving down I-5 three years ago in a car given to me by two lovely friends was that the trip from Tacoma to my apartment near Portland gave me time to listen to a lot of music.
The showpiece of the journey should be obvious if you read the story linked above. Another song on that case/lang/veirs album is “Song for Judee,” about Judee Sill. I mentioned her in my remembrance of JD Souther after he died.
Laura Veirs wrote the song, which starts with a reference to one of Sill’s best-known songs.
You wrote ‘The Kiss’ and it is beautiful,
I could listen again and again”
Veirs sings lead vocals on “Song for Judee,” which to me is every bit as listenable.
Judee Sill’s life story is not an easy one to process. This excerpt makes that obvious.
You never talked about your past
About the drugs and walking in the streets
They found you with a needle in your arm
Beloved books strewn ’round at your feet”
Damn. And let me just say that there’s no way I could ever write a story about her that would even approximate what her story requires. I don’t have that gear as a writer.
Lost Angel
Knowing that this is about the woman who wrote “Jesus Was a Crossmaker” adds one of many layers. A documentary, “Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill,” reveals others. Her songs can seem unexplainable, except that you want to believe her explanations.
“I still want to be the best songwriter in the world,” she said, “because the aim gives me something to strive for. I’m happy if there’s some hope of reaching a high place.”
“The Kiss” was a sign that she was moving in the right direction. Listening to the likes of Shawn Colvin, Natalie Mering, Adrienne Linker and Buck Meek of Big Thief and others talk about that song is worth every second.
A wider audience wasn’t ready for that album.
“How many people were interested in songs about a mystical Christ in 1972 and ’73?” Souther asks in the documentary. “Coming from someone with that very strange voice and strange combination of influences, records that had all the Bach progressions, with these big string charts and sort of Sons of the Pioneers steel guitar and coconut-shell hoof beats … it’s a real strange mélange of sound to put on a singer-songwriter record. That’s not what was happening (in those days). Jackson Browne was what was happening.”
“It wasn’t in a category, it wasn’t in a niche,” Linda Rondstadt says. “It was an original.”
One that still has musicians in awe.
“It goes through so many movements,” Meek says, “like an opera, almost. … She’s substituting chords all over the place. It’s amazing. It’s another artifact of her pursuit to try to remove the threshhold between the human experience and some kind of universal force.”
I just missed her
Had I known about her when things went south, I would have related. Nightmares of a different sort have hounded me my whole life.
“She just doesn’t go out,” a friend told Souther. “Curtains are drawn. It’s dark in there. And she is very much alone.”
Even now, I can relate. I understand fear when pain just keeps getting worse and there’s no relief. And what she was trying to say, songs about a mystical Christ, back then I was in my prime for being ready to hear it.
The world seems more ready now than it was 50 years ago.
“I think she’s much more popular now than she was when she was alive,” Tommy Peltier says. “And people are getting it now. They seem to get it and appreciate it.”
A kiss is not just a kiss
Mering, known professionally as Weyes Blood, takes one of Meek’s points a step further.
“She used the term ‘kiss’ a lot in describing God’s grace,” Mering says. “It’s almost like a sensual experience with God. It becomes slightly sexualized. She kind of wanted the two things to merge — you know, the love of two humans together and the love between a spiritual god.”
“Sweet communion of a kiss” is right there in the lyrics.
Linker said she had never heard a song like that until “The Kiss” found her.
“It just felt like something I could listen to throughout my whole life,” she says, “and continuously uncover more and more meaning. Like, it just seemed like a bottomless well — like a life-giving song, like medicine.”
That sort of power seems evident in Veirs’ singing in her tribute to Sill, which mentions “The Kiss” in its first four words.
There are gorgeous cover versions. Find them, and the original.
“Song for Judee” haunted me even on my celebratory drive back home three years ago in my new ride. It prompted me to listen to “The Kiss” again and again.
The CD is still there, still in heavy rotation.